therefore, in order to condemn racist biology. A science that sees itself as “populist” cannot help but worsen the forgetfulness of being and the destruction of the truth. The Contributions distance themselves from the “Address” in that it appeared impossible to ground the modern sciences in that way. They also distance themselves from it above all in that the “Address” is without doubt the only Heideggerian text in which every figure of death—being-for-death, concealment, evil, expropriation—is absent. In Heidegger, accepting the rectorate marked the moment of tragic denial. The tragic double bind found no place in self-affirmation, understood as the identification of the guided with the guide. This affirmation was supposed to bring the lieutenant of the Führer into solidarity with his university, just as at Aulis the denial of the family brought Agamemnon into solidarity with his armies. In 1933 Heidegger did the work of consolidation, betting on natality in the popular uprising as if mortality were not.
31. Being and Time, § 7.
32. The modern self is only illusory (“vermeintlich”, BzP 118).
33. “Entmachung der phusis” (BzP 115). In Parmenides, “being is already the being that is most of all” (BzP 473).
34. The word obviously alludes to mechanê in the sense both of machines and of maneuvers, like those to which Agamemnon fell victim (mechanêma, Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, line 981). The tragic machinery-machinations bind the victim with “chains no bronzesmith made” (ibid. line 492). The victim is caught in a net that is also a trap. In the German vocabulary of hunting, one would say he is gestellt. The two words Heidegger uses to describe contemporary technology, Machenschaft and Gestell, connote tracking down prey and the hunting trap.
35. M. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 74, 134.
36. There is a beautiful irony here, hubris traditionally signifying not the setting up of a standard or ultimate authority, but its transgression.
37. The standard that the event gives, as we will see further, is the double bind in which expropriation by mortality weakens appropriation by natality.
38. Jürgen Habermas, “Heidegger—Werk und Weltanschauung,” p. 20.
39. M. Heidegger, “Introduction” to “What Is Metaphysics?” According to the Contributions, “the questioning conversation” with the Greeks “already requires the leap” into the other beginning (BzP 169).
40. The word comes from Hölderlin.
41. For example, “the suprasensory world, the Ideas, God, the moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture, civilization,” M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York, Harper and Row, 1977, p. 65.
42. In the list cited (preceding note), it would be easy to put names to each of the enumerated representations.
43. “In giganticism is displayed the grandeur of the subiectum sure of itself and building everything upon its own representation and production” (BzP 441). Machenschaft should be understood as “the schema of thoroughgoing calculative explainability through which, in each being, everything blends together uniformly” (BzP 132).
44. “All have agreed no longer to raise any questions” (BzP 491), a statement not suggesting, to be sure, some consensus among subjects.
45. In this regard, nothing is more instructive than to frequent the colloquia of analytic philosophy in the United States. In order to reassure that their presentations will be “professional,” they are obliged to begin with the words “I am going to argue. . . .” Then, in the course of their demonstration, they indicate the possible bifurcations in the discourse: “If I had continued on with X, I would have come to undesirable conclusions; therefore, I continue with Y.” The confession is touching in its candor. The point of departure (always decisive in philosophy) is a desire, and argumentation serves to reinforce it. How then, is one to render the word argument {English in original}? As raisonnement, as one often reads it? Nothing is more naive. To argue a case {English original} is to plead a cause. Professional discourse is a pleading. One chooses a subject (usually linked, more or less, to what Americans consider their “values” as well as to their institutions, but that is another matter) and an opponent has to be proven wrong. As at the bar in court, one must persuade by the force of oneʼs claims {English original} (of positions claimed). In contradistinction to Greek sophistry, rhetoric serves to institute a proceeding in which it is a matter not of convincing, but of confusing. The good argument {English original}—a tight one, and giving the appearance of an irresistible deduction—is the one that leaves the opponent without any recourse. It is not a matter of winning the adversary over to your side, but of your side winning. The investment of desire in discourse can scarcely be more obvious than in this adversary method {English original}. One will find pleaders—in the second degree—for philosophy so placed in the service of “desirable conclusions” in Richard Rorty (Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, 1982, pp. 219f) and Robert Nozik (Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, 1981, p. 4). With Husserl, the philosopher-king turned himself into a functionary; in America, he becomes a lawyer.